There are few places that Games We Play leader Emmyn Calleiro won’t go in pursuit of a good punk/pop song. Including the messier corners of his romantic history.
“I don’t sugarcoat things, and if I messed up in my life I’m going to write about it,” he said this week. “And sometimes the only way I can cope with things is by laughing about them. During the past year I was dealing with marriage issues, a temporary separation and money issues— all the usual 23-year-old mistakes and the consequences I was facing. All of that went into the record, and I talk about it the same way I talk in real life.”
The record is the ironically titled “Life’s Going Great,” which has its share of punkish humor along with a few tender moments. It gets honest enough that one song, “St. Girlfriend” is about a guy who’s so nervous on a first date that he soils his pants and throws up. He swears this did indeed happen, though to his best friend and not to him.
“Writing words doesn’t come that easily to me, so I get help writing songs with my friends. In terms of writing catchy tunes and guitar riffs, I’ve been doing that since I was a kid so I can do that in my free time. Some of that comes from my dad — he’s a music fan and was pretty hard on me when I was writing songs growing up, so he forced me into the songwriter I am now.” One unusual feature of the album is a good amount of acoustic guitar. “Not that I don’t love pop-punk, but I’ve been trying to get away from it. Writing the record I was listening to things I’ve always loved, like Goo Goo Dolls and Dashboard Confessional, so that’s where the acoustic came in.”
The band made its first splash with “Deadbeat,” another catchy and funny breakup song, which went viral two years ago. “That put me in touch with people I’d always been searching to know like Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to go on tour, just because I wrote this one song that people wound up liking.”
Thanks to the viral success, Games We Play (a trio with co-guitarist Kyle Fink and drummer Chase Vernon) was opening stadium shows for Fall Out Boy before they had any records out; they also played the MGM Grand on the Fenway last year with Yungblud. Finally on a national headline tour, they play Brighton Music Hall on Wednesday.
“It should be no shock to the bands who’ve taken us out that I like this more,” Calleiro says. “Thanks to those bands, I finally have enough people to fill a room by myself. A lot of the show is just me talking, I probably spend 30 percent of the set just standing there acting dumb. On the bigger tours the timing wasn’t a concern, it was just the nerves of playing for that many people.” And how did he get past that? “By walking onstage.”